Using IPFS Cluster Service for Global IPFS Data Persistence

How to install and configure IPFS’s cluster service across your IPFS network

Automatic replication and pinning across your IPFS network

IPFS Cluster Service, a less documented tool in the IPFS family, is available to use as a means of automatically replicating and pinning content throughout your IPFS network of nodes. It runs alongside IPFS as a separate service and needs to be installed on all the IPFS peers that make your cluster. This article acts as a guide of the installation and configuration process, as well as an introduction to managing content on your cluster.

An IPFS cluster is a powerful tool that gives you a simple means of distributing content globally, via IPFS, with an easy to use CLI. The project homepage can be found at https://cluster.ipfs.io, and the Github project here.

Now, there are two methods of deploying an IPFS Cluster Service. Which method you favour will depend on your deployment methods. They are as follows:

• Method 1: To configure your entire cluster peerset and list them in the configuration file of your initial cluster node. Deploying a cluster service on this node will then sync the remaining peerset nodes to the cluster. This method is favourable for automated solutions with tools such as Ansible, whereby your deployment is run as an automated process. It is documented in more detail here.
• Method 2: To deploy the first peer of the cluster and introduce more as they are deployed. This method is a more favourable approach for manually introducing IPFS nodes to a cluster.

This article will adopt Method 2, and will focus on the higher level required configurations over the more technical.

Prerequisites - IPFS

An IPFS node is required to be running alongside IPFS cluster service; the cluster service is an extension of IPFS’s core feature set, a complimentary package that provides additional functionality on top of the core network. If you have not yet set up an IPFS node and would like to experiment with a cluser service, read my introduction of IPFS: